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As a graduate history student earning his PhD at the University of California San Diego, Jeremy Brown specialized in China’s Cultural Revolution, that decade-long phenomenon of social upheaval Mao Zedong unleashed on the country in 1966.

During Brown’s time at UCal, Michael Schoenhals, one of the world’s leading experts on the Cultural Revolution, came to the university to lecture. He offered the graduate students some advice.

History, he told them, was often consigned to the dustbin. It was there you could find the unofficial and more human story.

“He came,” Brown said, “and he said if you wanted to research the Cultural Revolution, you’ve got to become an expert in ‘garbology’ as he called it — meaning you’re looking through other people’s garbage, you’re going to flea markets, and he showed us some of the stuff he had bought there.”

It was a back-alley approach dictated by necessity. While the Communist party had officially renounced the Cultural Revolution as a period of chaos, the government was less forthcoming about making public the history of that period. Access to official archives was controlled, and often required official permission.

Brown, who is now a history professor at Simon Fraser University, ran into that official reticence in his own studies. In Tianjin, the largest port city in northern China, Brown, who speaks Mandarin, tried to get access to sensitive historical information by ingratiating himself to the archival staff there.

“I tried to to do the Maoist practice of the Three Togethers — you know, eat together, labour together and live together. So I’d eat with them in the cafeteria, and afterwards I’d go up with them and play ping-pong — I usually lost but I was getting better near the end — and I even helped in the annual cleanup of the archival building during the Chinese New Year. It didn’t work, though. I made some friends … but I didn’t get to see the stuff that I really wanted to see.”

He had better luck with garbology.

“The next time I went to China (in 2002), I went to the flea market in Tianjin … and I found a pile of Red Guard newspapers from the Cultural Revolution. I was paging through them and this man came up to me and said, ‘Hey, are you interested in seeing Cultural Revolution material? I’ve got a lot more material at my house. If you want to take a look, come on over.’ So I did. He had boxes and boxes of documents, so I went through them and picked the ones I wanted.”

Brown began to haunt the Saturday morning flea market. He liked the unconventionality of the work.

“It makes it really fun. I just have this instinct that if something’s being covered up, then there’s probably a story worth telling there. It’s sort of a combination journalistic-detective-scholar amalgam of what you have to do in order to cover the history of the Mao period, and for me, it’s a much bigger adventure than only sitting in a comfortable, well-conditioned archive.”

He became so well known among the vendors that they would put historical material aside for him. (He was often the only person that was interested in it, he said — since art manuals on how to draw nudes, for example, were much more in demand.)

Chinese authorities have since cracked down on the selling of archival material at flea markets, Brown said, but in his time there, he filled several filing cabinets with newspapers, manuals, police reports and government records. He bought a big dossier of individual cases of people who were banished from the city for “crimes” committed during the Cultural Revolution — crimes such as hoarding food and mending shoes. Tens of thousands were exiled to the countryside during the period.

The material often offered a human glimpse of the people who had to live through the Cultural Revolution. They spoke of the mundane, everyday worries common to us all — family, jobs, money. One of the more affecting pieces of research he unearthed was a series of police reports.

“I bought a few suicide investigation files from (the period of) the Cultural Revolution, which, tragically, would have the picture of the person who died. So the person would be looking out at you, and the file would say that this person died on this day, and here’s how they did it, and here’s why we think they did it.”

Brown has yet to incorporate the suicide reports into his writing. But they did reverberate for him when he turned to another part of his research.

“I was really upset, actually, going back to the files I had of the people deported from the city. Most of the files said the people who were exiled had returned to the city and found work again, or that they had had to stay in the country.

“But there were four or five of those 60 or 70 people of the reports I had who killed themselves. So I would read the report on a person, and I had gotten to know that person, and I would come to the last page and it would say they had killed themselves, and it was devastating. And I’d have to stop. I’d have to stop and go out for a walk, because I was so upset, because I knew things would change in China.

“Sitting in my desk here, I wanted to tell them that, if they could just hang on, things would change for the better.

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